MarkS
Moderator
I have often found the availability of surveys and journal articles a little frustrating. When I go caving I am usually interested to look at surveys and read accounts of exploration of where I?m visiting, but these are often tricky to find.
A quick google of some of the major UK cave systems from various regions (e.g. Easegill/OFD/Peak Cavern/Slaughter Stream Cave/Swildons Hole) suggests that digital copies of remotely up do date surveys are hard to come by. I know the MCRA website is a pretty good resource for the Mendips, and of course cavemaps.org is good for the Dales, but in many cases the surveys available are very limited. Bits of survey are sometimes available, e.g. for conservation monitoring, various simplified surveys are available, and it?s possible to use survex data and the few drawn up surveys, e.g. for Yorkshire and the Mendips in the Cave Registry Data Archive, but searches are often in vain, and it seems to be an exception when I can find this information easily. I often wonder why this is.
In the years before the internet, this sort of question would obviously have been academic. Clubs/individuals publishing surveys and journals would have to pay for printing costs, so there was no choice but to sell them, and no choice for individuals to either source or buy hard copies. However, nowadays it seems the norm for surveys and journals to only be available as hard copies despite the option to publish them digitally at essentially no cost.
I live a couple of hours from the nearest caving hut and local clubs have quite limited libraries. To read journals and see detailed surveys, it is necessary for me to either spend time at weekends reading in a caving hut rather than going caving, or to buy every journal/survey I have an interest in, which are fairly prohibitive barriers.
To me it begs the question, what is the main reason for clubs to publish journals and surveys? If it is to make a profit, then fair enough I suppose. Just selling hard copies is probably the best way to maximise profits from such things. However, if the main motivation is to publicise the activities that have been carried out, to provide documentation of cave exploration to the wider caving community, and to help facilitate future exploration, then nowadays surely this would be best achieved by making them available online as well?
I have pondered this for a while and am curious as to what people think? There is an indication that availability is beginning to change, e.g. with the CNCC making surveys (for example from the NPC and YCC) available online (thanks!). I wonder if more clubs will follow suit.
A quick google of some of the major UK cave systems from various regions (e.g. Easegill/OFD/Peak Cavern/Slaughter Stream Cave/Swildons Hole) suggests that digital copies of remotely up do date surveys are hard to come by. I know the MCRA website is a pretty good resource for the Mendips, and of course cavemaps.org is good for the Dales, but in many cases the surveys available are very limited. Bits of survey are sometimes available, e.g. for conservation monitoring, various simplified surveys are available, and it?s possible to use survex data and the few drawn up surveys, e.g. for Yorkshire and the Mendips in the Cave Registry Data Archive, but searches are often in vain, and it seems to be an exception when I can find this information easily. I often wonder why this is.
In the years before the internet, this sort of question would obviously have been academic. Clubs/individuals publishing surveys and journals would have to pay for printing costs, so there was no choice but to sell them, and no choice for individuals to either source or buy hard copies. However, nowadays it seems the norm for surveys and journals to only be available as hard copies despite the option to publish them digitally at essentially no cost.
I live a couple of hours from the nearest caving hut and local clubs have quite limited libraries. To read journals and see detailed surveys, it is necessary for me to either spend time at weekends reading in a caving hut rather than going caving, or to buy every journal/survey I have an interest in, which are fairly prohibitive barriers.
To me it begs the question, what is the main reason for clubs to publish journals and surveys? If it is to make a profit, then fair enough I suppose. Just selling hard copies is probably the best way to maximise profits from such things. However, if the main motivation is to publicise the activities that have been carried out, to provide documentation of cave exploration to the wider caving community, and to help facilitate future exploration, then nowadays surely this would be best achieved by making them available online as well?
I have pondered this for a while and am curious as to what people think? There is an indication that availability is beginning to change, e.g. with the CNCC making surveys (for example from the NPC and YCC) available online (thanks!). I wonder if more clubs will follow suit.